"I" and "we": writing the black femail self in Kuzwyo's Call me woman and Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

In the last two decades of the twentieth century there has been an upsurge of interest in self and identity studies. Through the bifocal lens of consciousness studies and black feminisms this article sets out to explore how the self is textually represented by the South African writer Ellen Kuzwayo, in her autobiography Call me woman, and the African-American author Toni Morrison, in her fictional Beloved. The aim is to show that although both writers are black and may represent commonalities there are also many differences in their depictions of the female consciousness that ultimately takes its shape from interactions within its own social milieu.